[Haskell-cafe] Re: Monads aren't evil

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Related to this issue, I have a question here.

I might  be wrong, but it seems to me that some Haskellers don't like
writing monads (with do notation) or arrows (with proc sugar) because of the
fact they have to abandon the typical applicative syntax, which is so close
to the beautiful lambda calculus core. Or is it maybe because some people
choose monads were the less linear applicative style could be used instead,
so the choice of monads is not always appropriate.

Haskell is full of little hardcoded syntax extensions: list notation
syntactic, list comprehensions, and even operator precedence that reduces
the need for parentheses, etc...

Of course IMHO the syntactic sugar is needed, e.g. a Yampa game written
without the arrows syntax would be incomprehensible for the average
programmer. But one could claim that this syntactic sugar hides what is
really going on under the hood, so for newcomers these extensions might make
it harder. It could also feel like a hack, a failure to keep things as
simple as possible yet elegant.

Some people I talked with like that about the Scheme/ & LISP languages: the
syntax remains ultimately close to the core, with very little hardcoded
syntactic extensions. And when one wants to add syntactic extensions, one
uses syntactic macros.

I'm not sure what others feel about the hardcoded syntax extensions in
Haskell...

Personally I'm not that much of a purist, I'm an old school hacker that
mainly needs to get the job done. I like the syntax extensions in Haskell
(and even C#/F# ;) because they let me write code shorter and clearer...

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:07 AM, Neal Alexander <wqeqweuqy at hotmail.com>wrote:

> Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:
>
>> Hello fellow Haskellers,
>>
>> When I read questions from Haskell beginners, it somehow seems like they
>> try to avoid monads and view them as a last resort, if there is no easy
>> non-monadic way.  I'm really sure that the cause for this is that most
>> tutorials deal with monads very sparingly and mostly in the context of
>> input/output.  Also usually monads are associated with the do-notation,
>> which makes them appear even more special, although there is really
>> nothing special about them.
>>
>>
> Yea, i was the same way when i started learning Haskell. I understood how
> Monads worked, and what the motivation was for them, but not why i would
> want to restructure code to use them in specific instances.
>
> "Why should i care about monads when i can use Arrows or (.)" was also a
> factor.
>
> Its kinda like getting advice from an adult as a child. You have no
> particular reason to distrust the advice, but the value of it doesn't set in
> until something happens to you first hand to verify it.
>
> For me the turning point was writing some code that needed to handle
> running code locally/remotely in a transparent manner.
>
> Maybe having a list of real-world usage scenarios or exercises on the wiki
> may help.
>
>
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